The human eye can suffer a number of maladies causing mild deterioration to complete loss of vision. While contact lenses and eyeglasses can compensate for some ailments, ophthalmic surgery is required for others. Generally, ophthalmic surgery is classified into posterior segment procedures, such as vitreoretinal surgery, and anterior segment procedures, such as cataract surgery. More recently, combined anterior and posterior segment procedures have been developed.
The surgical instrumentation used for ophthalmic surgery can be specialized for anterior segment procedures or posterior segment procedures or support both. In any case, the surgical instrumentation often implements a whole host of functionality which may be used in the implementation of a wide variety of surgical procedures.
Laser surgery to the retina is the standard of care in the treatment of numerous ophthalmic diseases. Diseases treated by laser photocoagulation include proliferative diabetic retinopathy, diabetic macular edema, cystoid macular edema, retinal vein occlusion, choroidal neovascularization, central serous chorioretinopathy, retinal tears, and other lesions.
As may be imagined, the complexities of these types of retina surgeries may be quite variegated, and concomitantly, the surgical devices used to conduct these surgeries may need to implement a whole host of functionality associated with these surgeries. Often, a surgical laser system may be operable to implement functionality associated with multiple types of surgeries or other procedures, such that one surgical laser system may be used in multiple types of operations or procedures. In many cases, however, these “all-in-one” type of solutions typically have prices which are commensurate with their functionality, in other words they may be quite expensive.
Often, however, customers may not require all the functionality that these all-in-one designs provide. Therefore, these types of designs may be cost prohibitive, more difficult to operate or wasteful of resources. In particular it may be desirable to have simpler lower cost units which may facilitate their use in places where the use of all-in-one designs (i.e. wide degree of functionality in a single unit) may be fiscally or physically impractical, such as use in disaster or rural areas, poorer communities or countries, etc. However, the laser (or other physical components or software) used in such a lower cost unit may be substantially the same as those employed in an “all-in-one” unit. Thus, for those that have need of both a lower cost unit and an “all-in-one” unit, or for those that desire to upgrade from a lower cost unit to an “all-in-one” unit, it is undesirable to pay for duplicate functionality or systems.
Therefore, a need exists for a laser surgery unit operable to implement a basic set of functionality which may be remotely controlled to implement a more advanced set of functionality.